


Defuse the Situation

by trascendenza



Category: Threshold
Genre: Humor, M/M, Personal Favorite, Ridiculous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-22
Updated: 2007-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-04 01:34:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trascendenza/pseuds/trascendenza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Cavennaugh is more the types to go for handcuffs and explosives than flowers and candy.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Defuse the Situation

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a haiku. Ha!

Cavennaugh isn't the type to go for flowers and candy. Arthur can tell. Foreign poetry or an excess of fruity mixed drinks—two other things that have served him well in the past—probably won't cut it, either.

But he has no idea what _will_ get him into Cavennaugh's very small, military-issued bunk.

A new gun? Some shiny restraints for when he plays cops and robbers with the infectees?

He considers explosives—because what says romantic better than a floral-wrapped package of illegal explosives?—but he's sure that would break a protocol or five, especially with Cavennaugh's happy trigger finger and propensity for blowing up things that don't agree with him.

Twirling a pencil in his fingers, he frowns, almost more annoyed that there's a problem he can't solve than anything else. He's been aware since day one that Cavennaugh wants him—honestly, _who_ gives a run-down lecture in a bathroom where with a few strategic shoves he'd have Arthur in a stall and all to himself?—but the man's obviously too uptight to do anything about it.

So the impetus falls to Arthur.

And he needs to give Cavennaugh an excuse that will salvage his pride. Something he can't resist.

Tapping the pencil at the corner of his mouth, he opens up his laptop and hacks his way out of the network so he can search for some of those illegal substances he decided against moments ago. He might be able to work something out with those, after all.

*

"Cavennaugh!" He screams at the top of his lungs, pounding with both his fists on the door. "Open up! I need your help!"

He almost pitches forward when the door does open, his arms wind-milling outwards to maintain his balance.

The first thing he notices is that Cavennaugh isn't wearing any pants: there are some very _not clothed_ legs now filling up Arthur's view. And if he isn't mistaken, those very same not clothed legs are pink and dripping from he surmises was a very hot shower.

He definitely chose the right time to come over.

Looking up, he sees a gray robe (how unfortunate), a towel tossed around shoulders and a head of short, dripping hair.

"What?" Cavennaugh demands, his entire _face_ glaring—without moving a muscle, oddly. Cavennaugh has one of those auras.

Arthur exhales slowly through his nostrils so he can keep a straight face as he says it. He's a practiced liar, but this is… different.

"There's a bomb in my pants."

Okay, so maybe he doesn't _fully_ succeed, but at least he stops himself from giggling. And Cavennaugh doesn't shut the door on his face, which is a more than he was expecting at this point. But he does narrow his eyes in that way that makes Arthur wonder whether Cavennaugh's got a sniper trained on him.

"You have until the count of three to leave." He doesn't even pause a beat. "Three." Without another word, he starts pushing the door closed.

"No!" Arthur steps halfway in, squashing himself between the door and the frame so Cavennaugh can't shut it without crushing him. "I'm not kidding. I wouldn't lie about something this important. I _promise_." He puts on his most earnest face. "I'm telling you, Cavennaugh. I woke up ten minutes ago with this ticking and it's near my most vital organs and you have to _help me now._"

And it's not an outright lie. (Except for the waking up part.) He _does_ need Cavennaugh's help; he just barely managed to arm this thing. He really doesn't want to try taking it off on his own.

That thought of what could go wrong makes him swallow a little, blood draining out of his face. That seems to do the job.

"Fine," Cavennaugh grunts, stepping out of the way. Arthur walks in quickly before he can change his mind. "But as soon as we get it disarmed, you're reporting straight to Caffrey. And explaining everything."

Arthur gives a mock salute. "Yes, sir." He heads straight for the bed, climbing up on it. "So is this the part where you tell me to strip?"

"Unless you'd rather I did it for you," Cavennaugh deadpans, looking pretty serious.

"Would you?" Arthur holds up his hands with a smile. "Butterfingers."

Cavennaugh raises an eyebrow. "I'll just get the scissors."

Arthur rolls his eyes. "Ha, ha." He begins unbuttoning his jeans.

Suddenly Cavennaugh steps forward, his hands braced in front of him. "Don't do anything stupid," he says with the tiniest hint of concern in his expression, which in a human with a normal emotional response would translate to extreme terror. (A physiognomy really is just a different kind of verb, in Arthur's experience.)

"What? What do you mean?" Arthur jerks his hands away like he's touched fire.

He hasn't got anything serious strapped on inside his pants, though he considered it briefly. He has been known, in the past, to put himself in jeopardy for the sake of a good lay, but that's usually only if the outcome is guaranteed, and he has no idea how Cavennaugh will measure up, so he sure as hell isn't going to risk blowing off the lower half of his body just for the chance to find out.

But Cavennaugh being worried is possibly the most frightening thing on the planet, followed closely by nuclear winter and shortage of fresh water. He looks down at his jeans in panic. "Are you trying to tell me I could make this thing blow just by taking my pants off?"

"Just—no sudden movements, okay?" Cavennaugh climbs onto the bed, kneeling, and puts his hands on Arthur's shoulders. "Nice and easy, now. Slow."

"Yeah, easy for you to say, Mr. Explosive-Free Bathrobe." Arthur grumbles, unzipping with painstaking deliberation. When he slips his thumbs under his waistband to push his pants down, he realizes that Cavennaugh is watching his crotch region with intense concentration. He smiles.

Now the fun begins.

Arthur's learned a thing or two from hanging out in strip clubs. Even drunk, he can't turn off the part of his brain that absorbs and analyzes and detects, so deliberately shimmying out of the pants that are a size too small is something he doesn't feel embarrassed doing. (Hey, strippers make great money with it, why should he be any different?)

The perceptible widening of Cavennaugh's eyes makes it worth the half hour he spent practicing that move before coming over.

And what comes out of his mouth next almost makes this whole "getting drafted to save the Earth" thing worth it.

"Ramsey, you're…" Cavennaugh's lips and eyes simultaneously tighten right at the corners, as if the next words are painful for him to speak. "Not wearing underwear."

Arthur brings up one of his hands to Cavennaugh's elbow, holding onto it and putting the other hand on his hip as he deliberately cants it to the side. He keeps smiling, waggling his eyebrows.

"C'mon, Cavennaugh. A guy like you should know all about going commando."

Cavennaugh tears his eyes away—Arthur has to give him credit for that; his magnificence usually robs people of that ability—and glares at him.

"Arthur, there's a _bomb_ covering your _dick._"

"Ding, ding, ding! And the perceptive award of the night goes to Sean Cavennaugh, five hundred dollars in stating the obvious."

"You think this is some kind of joke?" Cavennaugh's face is starting to twitch in all kinds of places now, and he's suddenly taking up a lot more space with the sexy-angry "if this weren't already a life-threatening situation I'd probably kill you" thing he's got going on.

His hands squeeze down on Arthur's shoulders, almost crushing. "If you think I'm going to defuse _that_—"

"You're right." Arthur reaches down between them, choosing a wire at random to squeeze two fingers around. "If you were feeling adventurous, you _could_ let me do it myself."

"No, don't—" The sound of Cavennaugh's teeth grinding is nearly audible. "_All right._ Just stand still. Stay right there."

"Sure thing, El Capitan." Arthur takes his hand off the wire obligingly and crosses his arms, waiting.

Cavennaugh hops off the bed and rummages around in his drawers. Arthur gets a nice flash of thigh when the robe bunches up around his waist, and if Cavennaugh's physical condition is anything to judge performance by, well, they're going to be in for one hell of a night. Cavennaugh turns back around with a small case opened in his hand, a tool clenched between his teeth.

He uses his free hand to gesture Arthur towards the wall, so Arthur walks backwards until he's standing against the headboard. He props his elbows on it and relaxes as Cavennaugh gets back on the bed and proceeds to kneel before him.

He's looking a little red around the edges.

Arthur drums his fingers on the wood of the headboard, satisfied with the situation. He's pleasantly anticipating Cavennaugh's reaction once he sees what's waiting underneath the explosive.

_Snip._

Arthur tries not to jump—that sound anywhere near his nether regions is _not_ something he ever wants to hear again after tonight. It looks like Cavennaugh's already gearing up to do another, so he braces himself.

_Snip._

"How are things looking down there?" He inquires, craning his neck to get a better view. "Besides the obvious Grecian godliness."

_Snip._

A grunt is his only reply.

Which works for him, actually, because Sean—he's not sure when he started thinking of Cavennaugh as Sean, but it seems like anyone he trusts enough to wield a sharp object within castration distance is someone he should be on a first-name basis with—looks very intent on what he's doing.

And having Sean look at him very intently is pleasing in many unique and categorically fantastic ways.

He can think of fifty different synonyms to describe particularly what kind of pleasing in thirty different dialects off the top of his head. He ends up combining Cantonese slang for "mouth" that contextually means far more, the Afrikaans word for "sweet," and mixes in a dash of the good ol' homegrown "fuckable." That nearly covers it.

The bomb, he notices, starts shifting as his enthusiasm becomes readily apparent and pushes up against it.

He watches Sean carefully, because any awry snippage in reaction to spotting the surprise erection would be most inopportune.

"I don't know about you, but bombs get me all hot and bothered." Arthur says, keeping his tone light and not overtly "I'm working up to the part where I suggest you suck me off" so as not to scare Sean off too early in the game.

But then.

"Yeah, me too." Sean's thumb is on Arthur's hip as Sean snips at the elastic straps holding the proverbial fig leaf in place. "But you know what really makes me hot?"

Arthur's skin tingles under the pressure of Sean's thumb. "What?"

"Getting a job done." The scissors make two last quick snips and the fig leaf falls away.

Sean's very fuckable mouth is curved into a very fuckable smirk.

"Uh huh," Arthur manages to mumble stupidly, shivering as Sean's hand grips around his waist. He dredges up one of the lines he'd planned to slip in suavely right about now from the minuscule part of his brain that remembers how to talk. "I have another job you could get done, Cavennaugh. If you're feeling up to it."

Sean raises an eyebrow. "It looks like you're up to it enough for the both of us." He straightens up, sliding forward on his knees until their hips are lined up, and, wow, okay, that's a _very_ nice erection Sean's sporting, there. It lines up perfectly with Arthur's.

"I've been telling you since day one." Arthur reaches down, untying the bathrobe in one swift pull and putting his hands on Sean's chest. "I'm the manly one, Cavennaugh. You're just going to have to find some way to live with that."

Sean takes a deep breath in, his chest expanding under Arthur's hands. "What, you thought I was arguing?" He asks in a graveled voice, grabbing Arthur's ass, leaning forward and biting at Arthur's earlobe.

"The constant alpha posturing and metaphorical pissing contests could be construed as argumentative of status." Arthur tries to shrug nonchalantly, but it's really more of a shudder because Sean's thumbs are kneading all sorts of sensations out of him.

Sean's grinding their hips together, erections slipping hard-soft, hard-soft.

"Just waiting for you to prove yourself, Ramsey," he exhales into Arthur's ear, positioning an arm between them and gripping, adding slip-fast friction.

"Oh, yeah?" (This comeback sounded more intelligent in his head than it does coming out of his mouth in a half-groan.)

"And I gotta tell you—of all the things I expected you to try, strapping a bomb to your dick was not one." He laughs a little, biting Arthur's neck.

"I—oh, _shit_—no, keep going. I don't know what you're talking about, though."

"Ramsey." Sean presses him back against the headboard, kissing his way down Arthur's chest, speaking in between pit stops down Arthur's torso. "I wasn't born yesterday. That cheap shit wouldn't do more than give you a bad pube burn."

Arthur loses a great deal of coherency when Sean's fingers thread through his as-yet-unburned hairs. "Whatever, Cavennaugh, it's the _thought_ that counts," he chokes out, jerking against Sean's touch.

But Sean's touch disappears.

Arthur pries his eyes open, which were shut tightly with his effort not to cry out. Sean is now lying on his back, propped up on his elbows. He gestures Arthur closer with a single crooked index finger.

"You're right. I have to give you credit for having the balls."

Arthur kneels between Sean's lazily opened legs. "Is credit good?" He asks warily, not quite sure if approval means he gets sex.

He pulls Arthur forward, hand at the small of Arthur's back guiding him right home. "Well," Sean licks a slow, hot line down Arthur's ear, his voice dropping into a low register. "Why don't you fuck me and find out?"

And that's about the part where Arthur stops needing words, stops needing thoughts at all, because there isn't a single one at his disposal in the two hundred dialects that can cover his reaction to _that_ offer.


End file.
